Obama’s Mideast Speech Drops the Ball Again on Our Critical Alliance With Israel

In his latest lecture to the Middle East, an ideologically purblind President Obama has again failed to acknowledge the facts on the ground, much to the detriment of American and Israeli strategic interests.

First, the President continues to confound “popular uprisings” with America’s strategic interests. This fails to account for the inherent danger that such movements can be usurped—if not instigated and abetted by—radical elements bent upon usurping them for anti-American purposes, as is increasingly evident in Egypt. Providing the new Egyptian government billions in debt relief and loans without the conditions that the Camp David Accords must remain inviolable both in law and practice, is but the latest manifestation of this administration’s Mideast dumbfoundment.

Secondly, the President’s ill-conceived and incoherent policy and mission creeping into Libya has now resulted in the administration’s diminished willingness to promptly call for Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad to exit power, ergo, we witness the Obama administration being more resolute in precipitously demanding the removal of an ally in Egypt than of an enemy in Syria—let alone in Iran.

While an increase in human intelligence-gathering and grassroots support for nascent democratic and free-market institutions and movements within oppressed nations will help ensure these freedom movements are not hijacked by worse tyrants and steered into anti-American regimes, the Obama administration refuses to accept the reality that these uprisings’ beneficent outcomes can best be effected by the success of Iran’s Green Revolution. Succinctly, the removal of a murderous terrorist regime that stole a popular uprising in 1979, and its indigenous replacement with a true, free, antiterrorist republic, will serve as an example and deterrent to the present movements being perverted by would-be despots.

Such strategic celerity, though, is lacking in the Obama administration. For, as is becoming abundantly clear, its missteps and missed opportunities stem from the President’s inconstant commitment to the strategic partnership that founds America’s Middle Eastern policies for our national security and regional peace: the American-Israeli alliance.

Israel is a market-based, liberal democracy that protects the lives and property of its people, including its minorities.

Israel is America’s key strategic ally in the region. Israel enhances our defense capabilities, provides us a secure foothold in the strategically important and turbulent Middle East, and has supported our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan by sharing its military technology and its intelligence on hostile forces.

Israel is under a constant and increasing threat from terrorist forces, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, instability on its borders, and the hatred of hostile nations, notably Iran and Syria, that seek our ally’s demise.

Already, due to the Obama administration’s bungling, radical political forces in Egypt are promising to press for the abrogation of the Camp David Accords with Israel, both as a matter of law and a matter of fact.

Inexcusably, the President’s opining and overtures have caused America’s and Israel’s shared strategic interests to decline in the Arab world—as has, not ironically, America’s popularity.

Now must end the Obama administration’s pressure upon our ally to make dangerous strategic concessions, which the President has done since entering office. Indeed, from day one the President has misunderstood and mangled the peace process, demanding concessions on Israeli settlements that the Palestinians had never made a precondition in negotiations. In return, all the President has reaped is the Palestinian National Authority pulling out of negotiations and endeavoring to have the United Nations foist a Palestinian state upon Israel without any direct negotiations. Moreover, the President’s “policies” have done nothing to stem the Palestinian national authority allying with the terrorists of Hamas, who are pledged to Israel’s destruction.

Today’s speech repeats the injurious canards of forcing unilateral concessions on Israel and claiming Hamas is becoming “moderate.” This is naive at best, and in reality, a foolish and dangerous misreading of a terrorist group that is America’s and Israel’s enemy. Instead, the President should have made it clear that if the Palestinian Authority chooses Hamas, it has turned its back on peace and forfeited American support, aid and assistance.

Bluntly, a continued destabilization of Israel’s security is a strategic sellout of the highest order, and a breaking of our solemn promise to our ally.

Mideast peace will not result from arbitrarily and unilaterally imposed solutions that will, in consequence, only further destabilize the region. Peace will come when the Palestinians and the Arab nations accept Israel as a Jewish state, abandon their dreams of eradicating it, stop demonizing Israel, cease teaching their children to hate it, and conversely, tolerate and protect the minorities in their midst. When this happens, the Israelis will have a true partner in peace, one with whom they can mutually work for liberty, prosperity and security in that long-troubled land.

Thus, to do otherwise in our strategic partnership with Israel, however unwittingly, would reveal President Obama’s failure to acknowledge President Kennedy’s sage advice: “The surest path to war is the path of weakness and disunity.”

No, in the interests of peace and American and Israeli security, the President must acknowledge the truths underpinning our alliance, recognize those facts on the ground endangering our alliance, and so doing, commence strengthening the foundations of the American-Israeli alliance and the very hope for Middle East peace.